Sarah Barns joined the Simons Foundation in 2020 as a genetics specialist for SPARK (Simons Foundation Powering Autism Research). In this role, she supports the large-scale return of genetic results to participants. She is also responsible for monitoring the day-to-day activities of biospecimen processing and supporting the genomic sequencing and analysis pipelines. Prior to joining the foundation, she was a laboratory manager in the Center for Neural Science at New York University and a laboratory associate in the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology. She also previously worked as a clinical research associate at Quadrant Biosciences, where she managed research projects investigating epigenetic biomarkers of autism, mild traumatic brain injury and Parkinson’s disease. She received her undergraduate degree in cellular neuroscience from Colgate University and her M.P.H. in epidemiology from New York University.